Saturday, August 29, 2015

The Secret Letters by Abby Bardi

When
thirty-seven-year-old slacker-chef Julie Barlow's mother dies, her older sister
Pam finds a cache of old letters from someone who appears to be their mother's
former lover. The date stamped on the letters combined with a difficult
relationship with her father leads Julie to conclude that the letters' author
was a Native American man named J. Fallingwater who must have been her real
father.

Inspired
by her new identity, Julie uses her small inheritance to make her dream come
true: she opens a restaurant called Falling Water that is an immediate success,
and life seems to be looking up. Her sister Norma is pressuring everyone to
sell their mother's house, and her brother Ricky is a loveable drunk who has
yet to learn responsibility, but the family seems to be turning a corner.

Then
tragedy strikes, and Julie and her siblings have to stick together more than
ever before. With all the secrets and setbacks, will Julie lose everything she
has worked so hard for?

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The casket was
a double-wide, with painted flowers on the side like a circus wagon. Pam said
it looked like hippies had scrawled on it with crayons while tripping.

“She’s at peace
now,” one of our idiot cousins said to someone I half-recognized from when my
mother used to drag us to West Virginia, where she was born. “Just a bunch of goddamn
hillbillies in the Mountain State,”
she always said, like she was Martha Stewart.

“Shut up,” Pam muttered
in the cousin’s general direction, smiling like she was saying something nice.
I hoped she planned to provide snark during the funeral, since I didn’t know
how I would make it through otherwise. My other sister Norma was in the front pew
sobbing. We were keeping our distance from her, not because of anything in
particular, but because we always stayed out of her way if we could. It didn’t
pay to try to comfort her, since anything you said would be the wrong thing.

The casket was
closed, thank God. Our mother had left strict instructions about this and
everything else when she was still conscious. Even while dying, she was a
control freak, and amazingly vain for someone who weighed just shy of 400
pounds, even with terminal cancer. “You’re beautiful,” we always said to her in
a Hollywood voice, “don’t ever change.” She knew we were
just messing with her, but she always smiled and patted her hair.

“That’s a hell
of a casket,” I said.

“Sure is purty.”
Pam’s eyes were red. I hadn’t looked in a mirror since early morning when I’d
slathered on eye makeup, but I’d been crying all day, too, and probably looked
like a slutty raccoon. “Is Timmy here yet?”

“Haven’t seen
him. It’s so crowded.” I scanned the room.

“Did any of
these weirdos actually know her?”

“I don’t know.
I bet those fat guys were football players at her high school.” I wiped my
eyes, though I knew it was a bad idea, smear-wise.

“Oh, there he
is.” Pam pointed to the back of the room and I spotted our older brother. He
was wearing a dark suit that made him look like a Mafia don, talking to some
blond guy. She tried waving, but he didn’t notice. His eyes were on the casket.
He hadn’t seen our mother in almost a year, and I was sure it was hard for him
to believe she was gone. Tough shit for him, I thought. He could have come here
when it would have made a difference. Now it didn’t matter to anyone what he
did.

“Is The Asshole
coming?” I asked, referring to our father.

“No, he says he
has a schedule conflict.”

“Probably golf.
You’d think he could at least manage to show up for this.”

“At least he’s
clean and sober.”

“So he says.
He’s probably still banging down Zombies at strip clubs.”

“Try not to be
bitter, Julie. It’s unattractive.”

“Bitter? You
think I’m bitter?”

As the minister
cut in and began to read the eulogy my mother had probably written for him, my
mind started wandering like I was in grade school waiting for the bell to ring.
I tried to concentrate, but I couldn’t. Every so often I’d tune back in and
hear things that weren’t true. Her devotion to other people. Her service to the
community. Her wonderful family life—I could just about hear her voice coming
out of the guy’s mouth. I didn’t know where she found him, since she never went
to church. I figured he was an actor she hired to play a minister, and made a
mental note to mention this to Pam.

As he droned on
in his phony actor voice, I closed my eyes and imagined walking through the
woods on the hill behind our house. Most of it was gone now, bulldozed to make
room for the townhouse development just over the ridge. I made a path through
the old trees, and the dogs ran in circles around me. Ahead of me was the pond,
though in real life it wasn’t there any more either, except for the hints that
sometimes bubbled up in people’s driveways. I was going to dangle my bare feet
in the water. I could hide there all day, and no one would know where I was.
Then I would run back through the trees to our house, with the dogs behind me,
and my mother would be there, and Frank, and Donny.

When I opened
my eyes the minister was gone, and some cousin who hadn’t seen my mother in years
was reading from a wrinkled piece of paper. She was stumbling over the words,
maybe because it was Mom’s loopy handwriting, or maybe she couldn’t read. It
was Mom’s life story minus all the bad parts and made going to high school in East
Baltimore, meeting The Asshole, and having five children with him
sound like an E! True Hollywood Story. Norma was born six months after
the wedding, and it didn’t take a mathematician to figure out the facts, but the
cousin glossed over that, and the ugly divorce, and finished with the happy
ending, my mother finding true love with Frank and then having little Ricky. Ricky,
on my left, burst into loud sobs. I put my arm around him and he cried onto my
shoulder. I could smell he’d been drinking again. I would have pulled him onto
my lap like I used to, but he was a big boy now. When I looked at him with his
tattoos, dreadlocks, and piercings, I still saw that cute little blond guy and
felt how much we had loved him. We still loved him that much, but it was
complicated.

Pam leaned
across me and held his hand. “You’ll be fine, sweetie,” she whispered to him,
though we were pretty sure he wouldn’t.